We're Not Gonna Have Barney Frank to Kick Around Anymore...

...Unless of course, he gets prosecuted. As he needs to be.

Ladd Ehlinger reminds us of how awesome he is:

Thieves, Liars, Whores, Swine and Gilded Fools: A Four-Letter Dissertation on Politics

August is traditionally the time of vacation, down time, relaxing. I need such most greatly, for a variety of personal reasons. So this post may be considered my declaration of farewells, for the nonce. I've learned that for me, blogging is a cyclical activity.

But first, it is time to take stock of the inanity which has prevailed before us, of the Debt-to-GDP ratio hitting 1-to1, of the thousand manifold bottles of snake-oil that the New Class has sold us. Walter Russel Meade has a fine dissertation on "The Progressive Crisis" (h/t: Ace), which the usual suspects of the droit-osphere have linked approvingly to. He correctly points out what Ayn Rand pointed out 60 years ago: that there is an unspoken will-to-power in the Progressive Movement. Our Saviors are as corrupt and wicked as the rest of us, and the people know it.

Barack Obama is full of shit. Harry Reid is full of shit. Nancy Pelosi is so full of shit she could fertilize Death Valley. Now, as it happens, being full of shit goes with the territory of politics, because politics is shit. Hunter Thompson, who had a Ph.D in Being Full of Shit, nevertheless once wrote something in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about the profession of journalism that I quote approvingly:

Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage.

But a few shifts in nomenclature and metaphor would suffice to make this an utterly apt description of politics. Politics is a bunch of glad-handling buffoons, flannel-mouthed ward bosses, and dipshit crusaders. There's but a few of any rank anywhere in the City of Washington that the country would miss if they all spontaneously combusted tomorrow.

This is not a matter of replacing one group of swine with another. I still haven't decided whether John Boehner is full of shit yet (odds are, yes). The nature of the activity is inherently corruptive. To rule others, one can adopt one of two strategies: letting the traditions of your people guide your every action, or attacking every vested interest not on board with your self-aggrandizing agenda. The first is mere office-holding, the second is tyranny. Progressives of every stripe keep declaiming that they have found the Third Way, and more bodies have been littered in that fruitless Grail-Quest than frozen ships seeking the Northwest Passage. It is a fantasy: nothing more than tyranny in a velvet glove. Politics is shit. Inhale deeply.

And that is why I could never muster the anger at someone like Charlie Rangel or Robert Byrd. Rangel is a thief, and a racist thief at that. But I suspect that, in some deep-down, cameras-off world that neither you nor I will ever see, the son of a bitch knows he's a thief, and justifies his thievery on the same grounds that I have offered: he must swim in the same seas as everyone else. That he's a fat little fishy in a sea of shit does not change the odeur of the water one jot.

So sure, catch the fat little fishy if you wish, mount him to the wall. Send his ample ass to jail: why not? That oily bastard lives by our sufferance, which we the people, in our limited wisdom but unlimited sovereignty, can withdraw at any time we see fit. Just you remember: there are plenty of fish in the shitty sea.

No, I have no animus for the Rangles and Byrds of the world of politics. Thieves are thieves, and eventually they end up robbing themselves. I reserve my true hate for the ones who claim not to hunger for graft or power but for a Square Deal for all Americans, the ones who claim that it is time to put politics aside and do the People's Will. Proggies have been shilling that line for a century, and it's the biggest pile of dinosaur shit there is.

The People don't have One Will; that Rousseauist fantasy builds nothing but guillotines. The People are a multiverse of conflicting dreams, desires, and ideology. They have no Main Line from which silken-voiced princes with first-rate temperaments can eternally suckle. 40% of them hate Democrats, 40% hate Republicans, and the rest would rather everyone just play nice. You cannot claim a Mandate to do whatever the hell you please on the basis of winning 51% of such an electorate. It is a house built on quicksand.

The People's Will is a fantasy, and I hope that Obama knows it. Bill Clinton did. That man was as gifted a liar as politics has seen in a while, but he was a better whore. And whores know that it doesn't matter what the john wants if you get extra for the service. So if the john wanted to hear that The Era of Big Government was Over, then Billi would make that sound pretty coming out of his mouth. He knew the tricks; he knew the game; the People (or 60% of them) loved him.

Right now, 50% of the People are fucking sick of Obama, of his fecklessness, his emptiness, his inability to handle one thing with anything approaching success. What the Sam Hell are we doing in Libya? Who the hell knows? Who's in charge? What the hominy fuck happened with ObamaCare? Did Obama even read an executive summary of it? And precisely what about trillion-dollar deficits does this simple bastard love so much?

The worst of all politicians, worse than Thieves, Liars, Whores, or other Associated Swine, are the Gilded Fools: the Bobble-heads, the ra-ra true-believing priests of the Progressive Leviathan. Fools there are aplenty in Washington, and every state house and city hall for that matter. Dennis Kucinich is one such, as is John Edwards (Sarah Palin might be, as well). But these are more or less harmless, as they quickly up-jump their place and show their true motely colors. But sometimes, press or party takes a Fool and Gilds him, makes him shine brighter than the Sunne in Splendour, and the 20% that just wants everyone to play nice will swoon like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert (In Edwards' case, the gilding did not work, perhaps because a gelding was more in need). By such precise means did a junior senator with no executive experience and a middling legislative experience parlay a MLK-timbered voice into the highest office in the land. The story was too good. We just had to believe that he knew what the hell he was doing.



And now we sit, with a government broke and broken, about to fundamentally disprove Hamilton's postulate that a national debt could be a national treasure (or for those who know the context of that remark, fundamentally prove it). And we are shocked, shocked I say, that the warring tribes cannot negotiate with one another. We can't believe that there's actually a dimes worth of difference between the two.

Well, there is. The GOP has no shortage of Thieves, Liars, Whores, and Swine. Duke Cunningham was a Thief; Gingrich was a Liar, and the Maine Sisters (Snowe and Dukakis) consistently sell their virtue to whatever trawler comes by. But the GOP doesn't get to Gild many Fools, because the gang of fuckoffs and misfits don't usually let them. The rest may or may not actually mean what they say about shrinking the size of government.

Yet even Swine can find a truffle, and the gang of elephants has stumbled upon the reality that eludes the current Gilded Fool: We cannot afford the size of the government we currently have. Not even if we expropriate the wealth of the nation can we afford it. You can only loot Microsoft once. It won't be there to feed the current services baseline next year.

Robert Stacy McCain has a succinct phase for this reality: The State is not God. Get over it. The State can't do everything or satisfy everything. It has limits intrinsic to its nature, which are thievery, force, and lies. You can accomplish much with thievery, force, and lies. But you cannot uplift the human spirit with them. They do not nurture the true and good. They will not succor the middle class, or any other class. They will work only until there is nothing left to steal, no force left untried, and no lie still believed.

And on that note, I take my leave. I will leave Revolutionary Nonsense fallow for a few weeks, but will return by Labor Day at the latest. Enjoy the the Dog-Days.

More on Tax Uncertainty

House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp has some testimonials underneath his creepy politician smile.

Are We Going to Default?

Maybe.

If we do, will that suck?

Assuredley.

Am I panicking over it?

Oddly, I'm not.

There's a kind of cosmic justice to all of this, that our government is so fundamentally divided that it cannot agree on how to undo the mammoth debt we've accrued. America has been a house divided against itself for some time; with progressives hungrily constructing their Leviathan and conservatives desperately trying to find a magic bullet that will kill the beast. Eventually, so powerful a discord creates positions across which no bridge can span. Somebody's going to win; we're all going to lose.

It's a thing called hubris.

I Can't Quit John Boehner ....

Every time I decide he's gonna sell us down the river, he gives us one of these: (h/t: Drudge)

“As I read the Constitution, the Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign,” Boehner said, recounting what he told the president, according to two sources.

That sounds like a man who's sick of negotiating.

Is there a Debt-Limit Deal?

No.

There isn't a deal until there's a deal.

Until the President and the Speaker say "We Have a Deal" (Reid and McConnell will do as they're told), we do not have a deal.

And since we do not have one until it exists, its pointless speculating about what's in it. We will not know until we can see for  ourselves who has stood, and who is screwed.

Democrat Try to Take Allen West "Into the Woodshed"

Racists (h/t: Instapundit)

This stands as another demonstration of the fact that protected identities are a boon granted only to leftists. No Republican would ever dare suggest that Elijah Cummings or Charlie Rangel needs to be taken to the wooshed, because RAAAAACISM! But Gwen Moore can suggest it of Allen "Uncle Sambo" West, and it's all good in the hood.

Allen West, of course, was a fellow disciplined in Iraq for interrogating a prisoner with a pistol. Somehow, I don't think the Congressional Democratic Caucus scares him.

The Gang of Six Plan is a Joke

Which is why it will probably pass. It does one or two useful things, one or two not useful things, and dicks around with the most needful thing, which is cutting spending and reforming entitlements.

Dan Mitchell has the details. (h/t: Protein Wisdom)

"Forget lifeboats. We need to rearrange these chairs!"

UPDATE: Ezra Klein tries to spin the thing, and it remains as stationary as a Soviet monument: (h/t: Memeorandum)

Then the Budget Committee is charged with drawing up legislation to extend the caps on discretionary spending — which cover both defense and non-defense, and, if I understand this right, cut more than $1 trillion from projected spending — until 2021, and to draw up an enforcement mechanism that will kick in if deficit reduction isn't on track come 2015. Come 2020, federal health spending is put on a global budget, with growth not to exceed GDP plus 1 percent. Finally, once all that's passed, the Finance Committee is asked to produce legislation making Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and their product is assured certain procedural advantages. There's very little in the way of specifics here, but there's an odd line suggesting that if this effort fails, then the vote on the whole deficit-reduction plan is invalidated.

In other words, most of the big savings come from telling the Senate Finance Committee to find said savings later on, and pinky-swearing that they'll make it easy for them to do so. The $500 billion up-front savings come mostly from some accounting tricks, including a reduction in Social Security's COLA adjustment.


And how is that markedly different from the House GOP's "Cut, Cap, and Balance" plan? A few ways:

1. Raising the Debt Ceiling is contingent on a Balanced-Budget Amendment. The BBA outlaws deficit spending and requires a two-thirds vote for tax increases.
2. The Up-Front Savings come mostly from non-defense discretionary spending. Such spending is reduced to FY2008. The actual number of savings is less, $111 billion to $500 billion, but the savings are more real.
3. This is acknowledged as the beginning of fiscal sanity, not the end of it. Obama has been touting a "big plan" so he can say that he "made hard choices" during next year's campaign. He wants to pretend that our nation's fiscal health can be tied up in a pretty package with the word "DONE" on the label.

In other words, CCB requires making actual spending cuts, while GO6 requires pretending that we have already made them.

Meghan McArdle Discovers That Spending Cuts Means Cutting Spending

Actually, she yells that the sky is falling, and blames the Republicans. For wanting to cut spending. (h/t: Memeorandum)

The GOP will have taken a chance at meaningful entitlement reform and a mostly-spending budget deal, and thrown it away for literally no gain.

What chance at meaningful entitlement reform was that? The one where Obama mocked Paul Ryan? The One where Obama offered a budget that the CBO said was ungradeable? The one where the Senate Democrats ignored the budget that the House passed?

Does that mean that I'm shilling for the Democrats and saying you can never cut spending?  Hardly.  But you cannot cut spending by 40% in the middle of a recession.

I'd take a 2% spending cut in real dollar terms. If Obama offered that, instead of magical next-year spending cuts that will never actually cut spending, there'd be no debt-ceiling argument. Eric Cantor suggested that, and Obama stormed out of the room like it was his party and he'd cry if he wanted to.

So yeah, Megan, that makes you a shill for the Democrats who never permits cutting spending. Because as soon as the possibility of actually cutting spending appears, you squeal like the angels are busting open the seals.

And then women will be forced to back-alley abortionists,
human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together...

EJ Dionne Doesn't Know What the American Revolution Was About...

Because, if he did, he'd know that if we were back in Boston in 1773, he'd be a Tory.

The American Revolution was not merely directed against monarchy. In the 169 years that the Thirteen Colonies existed, not a single monarch ever set foot in any one of them. No monarch ever made himself personally noxious to the American people.

What the American Revolution attacked was arbitrary authority, those "multitudes of new offices" that act beyond the scope of any public consent. That we have an elected Congress does not instantaneously legitimize whatever that Congress may decide to do. That is what the Founders understood, and what the Tea Party understands: that any government becomes illegitimate the instant that the people so decide.

The levels of taxation do not matter if the people no longer wish to pay them. Vague, self-serving remonstrances about measures for "the public good" do not matter if the people consider them contrary to their their own good. Popular rule does not mean merely elections, it means a government in the role of a servant, not a parent. As soon as those in office start believing they know the public good better than the public, then they have exceeded their brief, and it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish said offices.

Because a little Revolution every now and again is a healthy thing.

I Always Liked Lamar Alexander...

Niche tax breaks targeted; Senate kills ethanol credit

Alexander was instrumental in bringing this subsidy down. Quoth he:

“At a time when we are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend, it is a good time to take a hard look at unwarranted tax breaks, and one appropriate use of those funds is to reduce the deficit,” Alexander said Thursday.
“I am looking at energy tax breaks. I am opposed to permanent subsidies for energy as a general matter. I am in favor of jumpstarting new technologies such as electric cars, helping the next few nuclear plants get off the ground, but I am opposed to, for example, a permanent ethanol subsidy and a permanent subsidy for windmills,” Alexander added.

If it needs a subsidy, then it doesn't work.

Here's What I Don't Understand About NOW...

Look, nobody likes throwing an ally overboard. I get that. But when even his fellow congressional Democrats are calling for his resignation, why does the local NOW chapter keep supporting him?

“But he happens to be one of the best politicians out there, so we’re in a bad position. We’re trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Is it really so hard to find another person in the NY Democratic Party (or the NY Republican Party) who'll be a reliable abortion vote?

GOP Applies the O'Rourke Circumcision Precept

"You can take 10% off the Top of Anything."

It would be nice if they were going to slice everything quickly. It would also be nice if they were ready to slice whole departments from the executive branch. But I'll take half a loaf.

If you don't get the reference, you need to read Parliament of Whores. Or any O'Rourke for that matter.

Anthony Weiner: The Stupid Continues UPDATED

Another woman comes forward with Weiner pics.

That line about being hacked pranked joshed with sure is workin' out for ya.

UPDATE: And another... 

AND ANOTHER: Game Over. 

WienerGate: Synopsis.

I always feel bad for people surnamed Wiener. Everyone who dislikes them has an instant, lazy insult. So I have steered clear of Anthony Wiener (D-NY), however silly and irritating he would seem to be, because it's just too easy.

But for a man, surnamed Wiener, to (allegedly) send a picture of his...(*sigh*) wiener to a woman not his wife? On Twitter?  Seriously?

The Congresswoman Who Went Out in the Cold

News reports about politicians "snapping" are always a letdown. Most of the time, they're a highly exclamated account of an "outburst" that would not strike anyone outside the political world as being particularly noteworthy. Of course, I thought the same thing when Dick Cheney invited Pat Leahy to attempt self-fornication, so my perspective may be a touch jaded.

So my real purpose in linking Le Scandal(!) of Nancy Pelosi's speaking curtly to snapping at White House economic counsel Gene Sperling cannot be to gasp at her viciousness. Rather, I'm pointing out just how far out of the process Pelosi is: enough that she's complaining about it in a meeting "in the midst of an active but largely cordial meeting."

With Nancy, cordial means you retain all your precious bodily fluids.

Which, as we may surmise, is politician-speak for "the old battle-axe let us have it." So it would appear that Obama has thrown the House Minority Leader under the bus. Which is odd, given that he seems to be rapidly running out of friends.

Budget Popcorn: Butter or No Butter?

If the GOP was going to follow-up the Budget deal with some real cuts, they'd get right to it, wouldn't they?

Behold:

“This is about making the right decisions now,” Cantor said. He touted Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., budget proposal — a plan released last week that contains about $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years — and suggested Republicans would fight for at least a chunk of that plan as a condition of their support on the debt limit vote.

Cantor said a portion, and I think a portion is all he and Boehner expect to get. Which is what any sane person would expect when the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. Shutting down Pelosi (notice how absent she's been from these debates?), and hemming in Obama and Reid are about what Boehner can do. And I can tell that it's working, because:

“It’s totally unbalanced,” Van Hollen said. “He ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors. … They’ll have to eat all of the rising costs of health care, while they provide big tax breaks for millionaires and the corporate special interest."

This is what those triumphant donkeys of 2007-2010 are reduced to; muling and fussing about grampa's pills. Their backs are up against the wall, and they've got nothing to do but point to a weak-tea, half-assed version of the Ryan plan that the White House is going to offer.

So don't fret, wingnuts. Boehner and company are fighting the good fight.


UPDATE: The WSJ chimes in:

[T]he Obama-Pelosi Leviathan wasn't built in a day, and it won't be cut down to size in one budget. Especially not in a fiscal year that only has six months left and with Democrats running the Senate and White House. Friday's deal cuts more spending in any single year than we can remember, $78 billion more than President Obama first proposed. Domestic discretionary spending grew by 6% in 2008, 11% in 2009 and 14% in 2010, but this year will fall by 4%. That's no small reversal.

The budget does this while holding the line against defense cuts that Democrats wanted and restoring the school voucher program for Washington, D.C. for thousands of poor children. Tom DeLay—the talk radio hero when he ran the House—never passed a budget close to this good.

Indeed.

Relax: the Budget Battle is Just Beginning.

I'm not going to comment on the "Shutdown"-avoiding budget deal that Boehner and Reid cobbled together on Friday night. If you consider $38.5 billion in budget cuts too little, you're right. If you think Boehner showed spunk in dealing with the Senate and White House, you may be right. If you think the GOP has sold us all down the river for not getting $eleventy-trillion, you might need to take a breath:

The accomplishment set the stage for even tougher confrontations. Republicans intend to pass a 2012 budget through the House next week that calls for sweeping changes in Medicare and Medicaid and would cut domestic programs deeply in an attempt to gain control over soaring deficits.
And the Treasury has told Congress it must vote to raise the debt limit by summer — a request that Republicans hope to use to force Obama to accept long-term deficit-reduction measures.

Now we have a complete year's worth of budget to make the kind of gigantoid cuts that the Tea Party wants to see. And yeah, a good bit of that won't make it through the Senate, and it's anyone's guess as to whether Obama will sign it if it does. But Boehner has demonstrated that he can get Reid to cut more than he wants to, and that Obama will be largely irrelevant to the procedure.

So keep the popcorn warm and the powder dry. The real show is about to begin.

GOP Should Seek Clarity

The DC Examiner:

Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Ultimately, it is the people who are going to have to decide what course we take in these troubled waters. Politicians do well when they give people a choice between competing options rather than obfuscate the differences. The question is, do politicians believe they will be rewarded for this?

One of the main reasons for the Democrats' defeat this year was voters' sense that they wouldn't listen -- that they rammed through a predetermined agenda without paying any attention to voters' misgivings, and that they, in fact, seemed to glory in their lack of accountability. (Remember Speaker Nancy Pelosi's parade-with-gavel through the throngs of anti-Obamacare protesters?)
By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

They represent us. They ought to give a damn what we think.

Read the whole thing.

The Once and Future Governor: Ehrlich Rally, Bel Air, MD

I am told that I live in a deeply blue state. The outward evidence for this abounds: our House of Delegates and State Senate has been dominated by Democrats for a long time, controlling almost 3/4 or the lower house and 2/3 of the Senate.